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23 August 2012

You might want to steer clear of Saxon Switzerland on Ascension Day – that is, if you'd like to leave the country with any intact illusions about German trains running on time, or other national stereotypes.

Ascension Day is a public holiday in many European countries, and because it falls on a Thursday in May a lot of people take a long weekend and go away for the first break of the summer. In Germany, where it's called Himmelfahrt, it is also celebrated as Vatertag, Father’s Day, particularly in the Protestant states or those which were once in the GDR and disavowed religious festivals for a while. Its traditions are said to date back to days when men from rural communities would roam the countryside in spring, drinking to a good harvest.

Saxon Switzerland – and the adjoining Bohemian Switzerland – is the national park which lies alongside the Elbe between Prague and Dresden. Most British people I've spoken to about it have never heard of it and assume it's actually in Switzerland. Its rolling landscape punctured by weird sandstone rock formations and soft green forests actually look nothing like its namesake, but it was given the name by artists in the Romantic era, who loved to go there to paint. Hans Christian Andersen, Rainer Maria Rilke and other such literary luminaries followed, leaving accounts or poetry, which of course the BL holds, of their ramblings through the rough and dramatic countryside. [e.g. 10027.bb.20.]

In the late nineteenth century mass tourism arrived, strongly encouraged on the Bohemian side at least by local aristocrats, who saw the opportunity to transform the backward, rural area to everyone's advantage. Some examples of contemporary hiking maps can be seen in the BL – e.g. at Maps 29332.(22.) and Maps 29332.(20.). The landmarks on the Bohemian side of the border still bear the names of members of the Kinsky or Clary-Aldringen dynasties, and the hills are dotted with memorials to hotel-owners with names like Fiedler, ghostly but unselfconscious reminders of the German-speakers expelled after 1945, whose descendants now come here on holiday. There are footpaths and viewpoints, boat rides, cycle tracks and pensions galore.

Dresden's shiny new S-Bahn runs down the Elbe as far as the Czech border, delivering the many day trippers from the city to gaze at the grim Konigstein fortress, and wander across the vertiginous Bastei bridge. More serious hikers stay for days, and I knew something was up when I had trouble booking a room for May 17thin any of the picturesque towns along the river. That morning, Ascension Day, all the cafes had hogs roasting on spits outside at 9am, and people watched with pints in their hands. The trains were running terribly late, and when they finally limped into the stations they would disgorge hordes of gasping people, fanning themselves and struggling not to fall in the crush. Men bent on celebrating Vatertag pulled home-made carts with beer and even barbecues on them, and there were ingenious devices for carrying tiny bottles of spirits attached to their belts like ammunition. The low carts are not unique to Saxony; they have become a stereotype of the Ascension Day celebrations in Germany. Most of the revellers seemed very good-natured, though were a handful of exchanges between police and shaven-headed youths from the darker corners of Dresden.

For obvious reasons, Vatertag is not universally popular in Germany. By evening, however, the men had all trooped home again, leaving the bucolic delights of Bad Schandau, Konigstein, Rathen and Wehlen to more sedate weekenders and family groups, while police barges cruised the Elbe vainly looking for any stragglers.

16 March 2012

Last week my eye was caught by a newspaper article about a collection of 500 previously unknown fairy tales discovered in a German archive. The story was picked up in various countries and on Radio 4's Today Programme, so I was a bit surprised not to find any mention of it in the German press. It turned out that the discovery was actually made a couple of years ago and the tales were published in Germany in 2010; it was the prospect of an imminent English translation which had sparked media interest here.

Still, it was news to me and I'd never heard of the man who originally collected these tales in the 19th century, but Franz Xaver von Schönwerth deserves to be better known. No less an authority than Jacob Grimm praised for the "care, richness and gentle intuition" of Schönwerth's folklore collecting.

Schönwerth did publish some of the material he collected in his own lifetime: Aus der Oberpfalz: Sitten und Sagen [BL shelfmark 12431.d.18], which appeared in three volumes between 1857 and 1859, is a collection of the dialects and folklore of his native region, the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz) in Bavaria.

Schönwerth's introduction speaks of a "return of the German spirit", reflecting the rising sense of nationalism in 19th-century Europe (a factor which motivated many folklore collectors of the time). But his real interest is not so much national as local, and when he dedicates the book to "My homeland", he means not Germany but the Upper Palatinate, which he describes as "forgotten … in a corner near the Bohemian forests … as dear to all its children as green Erin is to the Irishman," – and from the evidence of Schönwerth’s work, as rich in folklore.

The three volumes are divided into sections covering the stages of human life, the social world of the house, farm and village, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Open it at any page and you will find something to intrigue or amuse. Some random examples give an idea of the range of stories and superstitions included:

The people of Neuenhammer believed that eating bilberries on St James's Day (25 July) would prevent stomach aches for the rest of the year.

No farmer in Tännesberg would remove a calf from its mother on a Thursday.

In a meadow in Waldthurn you can see twelve ghosts mowing at midnight.

Finally, since this Sunday is Mother's Day in Britain (though not in Germany), a tale Schönwerth collected from Fronau, about the strength of maternal love: A pregnant woman was could not rid herself of the belief that she was bound to kill her child when it was born. She kept confessing these thoughts to the priest, but they would not go away. So the priest told her that she could kill the child as long as she kissed it first. As soon as the baby was born she kissed it as the priest commanded. This kiss awakened the mother’s love, and from then on the child was the dearest thing in the world to her.

20 December 2011

Everybody knows that the Christmas tree came to Britain from Germany. These days a lot of know-it-alls like me will also smugly point out that it wasn't introduced by Prince Albert as is often said, although pictures of Victoria, Albert and their children around a tree definitely publicised and popularised the tradition in both Britain and the USA. However, rather than go into a long debate about the origins of the Christmas tree, I thought that for a festive blog post I'd mention some Christmas things which we owe in some degree to Germany without realising it.

1) Tinsel. Yes, tinsel was a German invention, originating in Nuremberg in the 17th century and originally made of metal foil. Like other shiny Christmas things (including the use of lights on a Christmas tree, ascribed by legend to Martin Luther), the theory is that it was meant to represent the stars shining over Bethlehem. One of the famous phrases coined by the humorist Loriot, whose death DACH marked in September, was "Früher war mehr Lammetta!" ("There used to be more Tinsel!"), a grandfather’s lament at the lack of decoration on his family's environmentally friendly tree.

2) Christmas Pudding. Of course Christmas pudding itself is very, very British. However, a story which I hadn't heard before but which I've come across in various places this year claims that it was the Hanoverian king George I who restored its popularity when he enjoyed some during his first Christmas in England in 1714. As this anecdote was new to me, I cynically wondered whether it was a bit of sly marketing on the part of a shop which is selling "George I's Christmas Pudding" this year, but whatever the source, it's been around for some time and appears in at least one respectable history of Victorian cooking [BL shelfmarks YC.2007.a.17420 and m07/.21989]. Still, at least we can't blame anyone but ourselves for mince pies.

3) Boney M. We all know that the much-loved "Silent Night" comes from Austria, and Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without Handel's Messiah. But in my local supermarket on Saturday I was reminded of another great German musical contribution to Christmas: Boney M's rendition of "Mary's Boy Child". Although all the members of the band came from the Caribbean and most grew up in the UK, the group was put together and their records produced in Germany by singer-songwriter Franz Farian. (Boney M also recorded a version of "The Little Drummer Boy", but let's draw a veil over that.)

So, as you trim your tree with tinsel, prepare your pudding and put on your festive pop hits album, remember the metalworkers of Nuremberg, the Hanoverian kings of England, and the disco singers of Offenbach am Main. And have a very happy Christmas.

07 September 2011

Outside the financial pages, the main news story from Germany to feature in the British media this summer was that of Yvonne the cow. Yvonne escaped from a Bavarian farm in May and spent over three months defying increasingly ingenious attempts at capture. Finally, with a smart bovine eye for the end of the silly season*, she allowed herself to be recaptured on 1 September, and will now live out her days in an animal sanctuary.

A German story which hardly featured at all in the British press (here's an exception) was the death of "Loriot", the pen and stage name of Viktor von Bülow. You may be thinking "who?", but if you've spent any significant length of time in Germany you’ll probably be familiar with the pseudonym – or at least with Loriot's distinctive cartoon figures, often of plump, rather melancholy-looking, spud-nosed men.

But Loriot was not just a cartoonist, but also a writer, director and performer; he directed and starred in two successful films and made a series of TV shows which have become classics. He coined catchphrases which echo through the obituaries in the German media, and his characters such as Wum the dog (dogs were a constant in both his life and his cartoons) and the "Stone Louse" also remain household names. The latter, created for a spoof nature documentary, was later included as a joke entry in a standard German medical dictionary; its removal in 1994 led to an outcry and its hasty reinstatement.

Although he became a national treasure, Loriot first came to prominence with something of a scandal. A series of cartoons for Stern magazine in the early 1950s, "Auf den Hund gekommen" ("Gone to the Dogs"), showed a world where the roles of human owners and canine pets are reversed and were condemned by readers as "disgusting" and "a degradation". But Daniel Keel, who had recently founded the publishing firm of Diogenes in Zurich, had sufficient faith to publish the cartoons in book form. Loriot remained loyal to Keel and his firm for the rest of his life.

Auf den Hund gekommen is the only one of Loriot's works which I can find that has appeared in English (Dog's Best Friend, London, 1958; BL 012332.a.51). Perhaps British audiences were as shocked as German ones and wanted no more, or perhaps it’s just that humour doesn’t always travel well. Indeed, many Brits tend to think that humour is completely lacking from the German psyche, and would consider "Germany’s greatest comedian" (as Loriot was voted in 2007) a contradiction in terms. You can find some of his sketches on the Internet (some are even available with English subtitles) and make up your own mind.

Differences in humour aside, it's difficult for a non-German to fully appreciate or explain Loriot's significance; I feel a bit presumptuous to be writing about him at all. But I hope I'm right in saying that he was a man who would have seen the funny side of being less interesting to the British public than a runaway cow.[SR]

* And thanks to Yvonne I now know that the German word for Silly Season is Sommerloch – literally "summer hole".

04 March 2011

I'm a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur supporter and first saw them play in 1958 as a schoolboy in London. I've lived in the north for many years now but while changing one's car, house or even wife is perfectly normal behaviour, changing one's football club is completely out of the question. In the next few weeks I shall be cheering on my beloved Spurs in their away matches at Northern venues.

Spurs have a glorious history and are regarded as one of the big clubs in English football. They're doing very well at the moment in both the Premier League and European Champions League and at last challenging that other lot from N5 for the top honours. But I wonder how many of today’s fans know about a darker incident in the Club's history from the 1930s.

In 1935 the swastika flew over the Club's stadium, White Hart Lane (actually at half-mast as a mark of respect to Princess Victoria who had died the day before) when an international friendly between England and Germany took place at the ground. It was a curious choice of venue because within football Spurs are known as "the Jewish club" owing to support from Jewish communities in north London. There were also Jews among the players.

After the fixture was announced the public, press and radio discussed its possible implications widely. Even more importantly the government considered it but failed to perceive its significance at a time when the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy was so evident. As a consequence of the match going ahead the propaganda war associated with it was lost.

In the months preceding the match there were protests by Jewish groups, football groups, factory organisations and trade union bodies because of the Nazi propaganda surrounding the game. The protests were further fuelled by stories of a Polish Jew being killed by Nazis during another match in Germany.

The 1930s saw huge numbers attending football matches as the game was now established as the main working-class recreation amongst males, and 10,000 Germans made the journey across the Channel for the match. Turnstiles were marked Zweischilling Eintrittskarte for their benefit.

On the day of the match a demonstration march converged on White Hart Lane. Leaflets printed in German were handed out by demonstrators and there were some minor scuffles with pro-Nazi sympathisers. But no major incidents occurred and the game was played without trouble in front of a 60,000 crowd. England won 3-0.

In more recent years Spurs have seen some happier German associations with players like Steffen Freund, Christian Ziegler, Ghanaian German Kevin-Prince Boateng, and the incomparable Jürgen Klinsmann coming to play for them. But the 1935 England-Germany international remains a bizarre episode in the history of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

27 August 2010

I know it’s a blog about the Germans but what about turning the tables and writing down my impressions as a German speaker about the three months that I spent in London. I've got a notion that within a short period of time I saw quite a lot, probably a bit of everything from the entire world culture. Why do I say this? Because you have just a huge choice here and plenty of different possibilities to do something. No matter what, from museums (where you can push buttons or hear figures explaining world history ... amazing for children, to learn by playing). Musicals, theatre, classical music (and every day in summer, the Proms), concerts, galleries.

Not to forget the British Library which is not a usual Library. I had the opportunity to do work experience here which was wonderful. I saw how the processing of the books works, the history and the architecture of the building. The people working there have a lovely sense of humour. And I have to recommend the tour of the BL. It’s different – not as boring as some guided tours can be. I have always been interested in books but after this time here I’m going to buy probably over 100 books. (More than I had in mind). Some of them that I had a quick look in, are too good to miss. My father would definitely approve. I'm going to have many demands on my purse (a poor student like me). But as everybody knows; knowledge is expensive (Oxford, Cambridge…).

Oh and what I nearly forgot, the most famous thing that everybody speaks about is probably the weather, because it is so changeable like nowhere else. And to mention the food there is a restaurant near where I stayed in Finchley which has the best fish and chips ever. (Madonna used to go there as well.) There are markets that are as long as the whole Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich . You have parks, you can’t have more green than this. Ok maybe in Scotland… but you know what I mean: you don’t have to go on vacation, it’s not necessary. You have everything here. (I’ve been to Brighton three times.) Lucky you!

Anyway most of the culture related things are for free. I'm perhaps too enthusiastic but I had a really good time. Also impressive is your recycling system. We are probably one of the cleanest countries in the world but we still haven’t a separate recycling system for plastic cups. Stuff like that is general waste in Switzerland.

I think there is something about London and I will come back that's for sure. At the very end I'm left saying: it was a really exciting, interesting time and what stuck out was the friendly nature and the helpfulness of the people everywhere. And this constantly (apart from some bus drivers but that’s another story...)

17 August 2010

As part of her work on a forthcoming BL science fiction exhibition, a colleague asked me yesterday about examples of the genre from Germany. To be honest, I was stumped. I couldn't think of any internationally-known German sci-fi writers, and didn't remember ever coming across references to authors known within DACH but not abroad.

The only thing that immediately sprang to mind was
Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927). I didn't realise that this was adapted from her own novel by Lang's then wife Thea von Harbou. She wrote at least one other sci-fi novel, Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), also filmed by Lang. But colleagues in Exhibitions were ahead of me there and are already examining our copies of both novels and of an English translation of Metropolis with pictures from the film.

So I then turned my mind to literary fiction. I suppose it could be argued that Kafka's novels – and in particular his short story 'In der Strafkolonie' (In the Penal Colony) with its torture machine – share elements of science fiction, portraying encounters between 'ordinary' people and societies governed by alien and arbitrary rules. Similarly, Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), although lacking the technological trappings usually associated with sci-fi, nonetheless offers a vision of a future society which is part utopia, part dystopia, a typical theme of the genre.

Perhaps more on the 'forgotten classics' shelf are Paul Scheerbart, author of the 'Asteroid Novel' Lesabéndio (BL shelfmark: 12552.v.3), and Alfred Kubin who illustrated Lesabéndio as well writing and illustrating as his own strange dystopian fantasy Die andere Seite (The Other Side).

But these are all borderline cases and concerned more with philosophical allegory than with social and technologial speculation, let alone with pure entertainment. Surely there are examples of more popular German science fiction? Some secondary literature about the genre in fact provided me with the names of many writers, both popular and more literary, from Kurd Lasswitz, the 'father of German science fiction' in whose name an annual science fiction prize is awarded in Germany, to Andreas Eschbach, the most recent winner of that prize.

However, in terms of sheer scale if nothing else, the titan of German sci-fi must be Perry Rhodan, the hero of weekly serial stories first published in 1961 and still going strong after more than 2,500 weekly editions plus additional spin-offs. Although best known in DACH, Perry has followers worldwide (some English translations appeared in the UK and US in the 1970s, e.g. BL: Nov.34072). A Perry Rhodan Lexikon (BL: YA.1983.a.3370) was published back in 1983, and there’s now an online 'Perrypedia' where fans (and curious librarians) can find out about all aspects of the 'Perryverse'.

So, there's more German sci-fi than I thought; I hope there'll be room in the exhibition for some of it!

04 August 2010

Having a laugh at the Germans' expense probably reached its zenith in the UK when Basil Fawlty came on the scene. At the time of Fawlty Towers in the 1970s there was still a big appetite for jokes about Germans and the war. When hotel owner Fawlty incensed his German guests in an argument about the service and they insisted they hadn’t started it all, his reply, "Yes, you did, you invaded Poland" had the watching nation rolling around the floor. In the 1980s this mockery was giving way to a gentler humour. In 'Allo, 'Allo!, a comedy set in wartime France, the German characters – think of the camp Lieutenant Gruber, the sexy Helga, all stocking tops and suspenders, and the Gestapo officer Herr Otto Flick with his ludicrously exaggerated limp – seriously rivalled the French ones for the main laughs, but they were all characters we basically liked.

We have continued to poke fun at the Germans in one way or another, including their putative inability to understand humour. German joke: "Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? – Because it would not be financially viable to attempt to sell pharmaceuticals in the largely unpopulated rainforest". There is some evidence to support this belief. The recently opened Caricatura Museum in Frankfurt, a shrine to Germany’s humour, satire and comic art, drew this comment from its curator, "We have only just opened the museum because until now we didn’t have enough comedy to put in it".

Two world wars obviously led to a lot of anti-German feeling in the last century which manifested itself in part in humour which mocked the Germans. But the Second World War is now a distant memory and the jokes are wearing thin. Even the tabloids who once revelled in headlines such as "Don't mention the score" after England’s 5-1 football victory in 2001 are struggling to raise a laugh anymore. "Fritz all over" seemed laboured and outdated after our World Cup exit this summer. The fact is it’s difficult to take the mickey out of a nation which is so much better than one's own at so many things. In football for example, apart from the 1966 World Cup Final and that 5-1 victory in Munich in a World Cup qualifier, the Germans have largely held the upper hand in recent decades.

And then there’s the car industry. Think of all those lovely BMWs, Audis, Mercedes and Porsches. I can vouch for this personally after occasionally hammering down the motorway at 100 mph in my VW Golf, leaving Fords, Vauxhalls and even Jaguars eating my exhaust fumes. And what about foreign languages. I don’t know what the Germans do in their schools but whatever it is they turn out better linguists than we do. I was again impressed with the English fluency of Boris Becker and Jürgen Klinsmann when they appeared on BBC Television this summer commenting on Wimbledon and the World Cup. They may well have benefited from their international careers in learning English but the thought of Andy Murray or Wayne Rooney reciprocating in German is beyond credibility. And even the ordinary young Germans I’ve met have always spoken admirable English. By comparison, it would be hard to find an English teenager who could even render "Where’s my mobile?" into German. And finally, take economies. After the Second World War left Germany on its knees, with many of its cities destroyed, West Germany soon became a major economy once more, and now a unified Germany has the largest national economy in Europe, ranked fourth in the world by GDP and still ahead of the UK. All of this without even mentioning their colossal contributions in philosophy, literature, music and science.

None of this, of course, exempts the Germans from being the butt of future jokes – different nations have always made fun of each other and always will – but these days any humour is fuelled by grudging admiration rather than emotions for an erstwhile enemy. And, anyway, there is much less to laugh at these days, while for them looking at us, well that’s another matter.

09 July 2010

So Paul the psychic octopus was right and Spain has knocked Germany out of the World Cup. But Germany, or ‘Schland’ to give the national squad its suddenly popular nickname, had a good innings in the tournament (if that’s not mixing my sporting metaphors).

As a bit of a sports agnostic, I can’t claim to have watched any of the actual games other than accidental exceprts, but I have found it fascinating to follow the progress of the tournament, not least because of the traditional tabloid obsession with Anglo-German football rivalry and the way this has very slightly and subtly started to change. I met my football-mad brother after the England v Germany match and he freely admitted that ‘the better team won’. Now my brother is by no means one of the Germanophobic ‘two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup’ brigade, so I would expect a balanced view from him, but I did get a feeling that many Britons were showing a more generous and admiring spirit towards the German team than I’ve been aware of in the past.

Certainly when the 2006 World Cup was played in Germany, British reactions were still stuck in an old groove, as reflected in the titles of books from the BL catalogue aimed at English fans such as: Who do you think you are kidding Mr Klinsmann? (YK.2007.a.11272), Don’t mention the World Cup (YK.2007.a.13978) and Another trial in Nürnburg [sic.] (YK.2009.a.34978). German fan books were less obsessed with past rivalries, revelling instead in what became known as the country’s ‘Sommermärchen’ (‘Summer fairy tale’).

As it happens, the BL bought a number of German books, both popular (e.g. YF.2007.b.3184 ) and more academic (e.g. YF.2010.a.16099), relating to the 2006 World Cup. This was not as frivolous an exercise as it sounds, because the tournament was something of a watershed in German self-perception, allowing an uncomplicated and unembarrassed feeling of national pride at home and creating a more positive image of hospitality to the teams and fans from abroad.

Perhaps this watershed was a contributory factor in the development of the young and multicultural team which has made such an impact in South Africa four years on. Certainly when one of the aforementioned British tabloids actually prints an article suggesting that it was ok to support Germany after England had been knocked out of the tournament there must have been some shift in perception! Granted, the bulk of the article is couched in the traditional rhetoric of the World War Two comic strip, and the prime reason given for supporting Germany is that they beat Argentina, but it’s still something of a sea-change in British football coverage. Besides, this year the British press has also started to realise that for the Germans, playing England is really no big deal in terms of traditional rivalries. If the final had been Germany versus Holland, that would really have been seen as the big grudge match in ‘Schland.’

Don’t worry, I won’t try to do the impossible of linking both of these events; it is maybe better to follow the good old German line “Ladies first!” (English: “Ladies first”), and concentrate on Lena.

First, the bare facts: Germany had chosen Lena in a competition called “Our Star for Oslo”, which is quite a different approach from how this competion is promoted in Britain (come on Brits, “Your Country Needs You!” sounds too much like a military draft slogan!). Second, whereas the British contribution was written by Pete Waterman and Mike Stock, better known from the 1980s hit-machine Stock, Aitken and Waterman, the “German” song was written by a younger Danish and US-American songwriter duo. Third, the BBC’s Mark Savage even stated that the winning song ‘Satellite’ dragged the ‘Eurovision into the 21st Century’, and that the British song ‘sounded like it had been pulled off a shelf marked "Jason Donovan rejects (1988)".’ That is maybe a bit too harsh and self-deprecating.

Lena’s manner of pronouncing English – for some native speakers irritating, by some Germans perceived as an “authentic British accent” – was at best quirky.A friend of a friend wrote on Facebook that she wasamused by the “Cockney/American/Caribbean/German accent”, and another English native thought that Lena tried to “emulate Lily Allen with the whole Cockney thing”.

But why did people across Europe and some of the national juries (their 50% shares in the outcomes reduced the scare of “political voting”) like Lena and her song? Well, the song was different and “modern”, but also

: 1. The irritating accent was only really annoying to native speakers, and most European citizens aren’t native in English;

2. Like Nicole and her winning song “A Little Peace” in 1982, both young women represented a beautiful, “innocent” and maybe naïve Germany (definitely not these Teutons who mark their territories on European beach fronts with towels!); 3. Unlike the boring old-fashioned or too familiar-sounding entries from Azerbaijan, Britain, and Spain (just to name the ones I could bear to listen to), ‘Satellite’ related more to what younger people today listen to; 4. It is a song with a catchy tune – never mind the words!

Let me “sign-off” by copying again from a discussion on Facebook:

A friend of a friend: “Decent song from Germany. Hoping they will be happy with this and not bother with the world cup...”

My reply: “No never! And the next thing after the footie is getting back the World Cup title for Handball from the French’s Men team in 2011! ;-)”

In that sense, don’t worry about the World Cup in South Africa, or Germany’s new star with its own satellite. Worry about the sports event in Sweden from 14-30 January, 2011!